This suggestion is inspired by a TV report about eagles I watched a few months ago. Eagles have a special feature in their eyes: the center of their vision field has a telephoto lens, so they have a split focal width. I don't remember if this is true for all species of eagles or just some. But anyhow, it is a real earth life thing.

For oolite, I suggest the crosshair area to be a (switchable) telephoto lens. So, it will not zoom the whole view, only the center part of it.
I think this adds more balance to the game, as pirates seem to be able to aim very exactly from long ranges, while the player can't because long range objects are just too small.
I've already tried the Telescope OXP, but either I did not really understand how it works, or it is not a tool for manual aming.

I think you will need core changes to do this as you describe, King Kobra. Apart from the OXP recommendations from Norby, the closest you can get to what you want with what we currently have available is building the game code with the setting OO_FOV_INFLIGHT_CONTROL_ENABLED set to yes in the file config.make in the source code distribution. This will activate two additional keys ("k" and "l" by default) that will enable the in-game field of view change capability. This in turn will enable you to zoom the view in and out while in flight.

If you cannot be bothered building from source but would like to try this and are on a Windows OS, let me know and I can upload a suitably modified executable for you.

I was the one having coded the fov feature (with heavy help from another_commander).

I play with it enabled, zooming and unzooming through joystick. It adds lots of interest to my game, these ways:
- I can zoom on a distant thing, and see it better, which is quite nice for beautiful details,
- I can unzoom to a general view, which is beautiful, and relaxing; and quite logical for the cargo pilot I am, coupled with the Telescope balls,
- I can zoom on an enemy, and target it better, which is balanced by several things:
* the way the joystick is then more sensible (think holding a telephoto lens, we see farther, but it is very sensible to your movements)
* I lose then my general view,
* I play with cannons limited to 10km, powerful but limited, so no sniping,
* I lose time to go from precise view to general view, and vice-versa.
I feel it very natural to fly that way.

It could be possible to make available the fov control to oxps.
Yet:
- it's some work,
- it might not be deemed a desirable thing,
- I don't know if there would be some interest,
- the oxps using this should not conflict.

What could we do with this? Well...
An omniscope? (170° view)
The telelens of hell? (1° view)
Scriptable zooms for scenario events? (When you come nearest than 20 km from a casino / spacebar and request boarding, a ultrazoom very quickly occurs on the building most beautiful feature, then unzoom)
... ?

============

Concerning a zoom into a small part of the screen only, I think it would imply to calculate two screens each time :-/
Yet, I wondered recently if we could do this ... for virtual reality purpose :-p ?

Concerning a zoom into a small part of the screen only, I think it would imply to calculate two screens each time :-/
Yet, I wondered recently if we could do this ... for virtual reality purpose :-p ?

That might be interesting … did you ever play TIE Fighter? It had a neat feature where the ship/station you had targeted was displayed, at a set zoomed-in size, on the player's console, showing its current orientation - you can see what I mean on this video, here:

Sorry Disembodied, just for the sake of clarity (I'm not a native english speaker), are you speaking of the Telescope oxp ?
I'm confused because you wrote "would".

This oxp is working for a long time, and I often think with gratitude to its developer.
Checking who he is... Of course it's Norby. I lost the count of Norby's oxps I use.
Thanks be to Norby

another_commander, I don't remember how much the code of the camera / point of view is linked to the ship.
Would you think it possible to add relatively easily a second calculus with the same world but a different point of view?
And, reducing the scope, with just a little horizontal difference for 3D vision (meaning exactly the same objects in the view) ?
And finally, would you know if this would impinge on the code of other projects (I think to the project of oolite resizing, and maybe there is already another virtual reality project?) ?

Sorry Disembodied, just for the sake of clarity (I'm not a native english speaker), are you speaking of the Telescope oxp ?

Sorry - I mean, the effect of having a close-up model of the currently targeted object displayed in a window somewhere on the HUD. Ship modellers spend a lot of time making beautiful and detailed ship models, and players spend a lot of time shooting at tiny versions of them, far away. I think a feature like this would make the game more visually satisfying.

another_commander, I don't remember how much the code of the camera / point of view is linked to the ship.
Would you think it possible to add relatively easily a second calculus with the same world but a different point of view?
And, reducing the scope, with just a little horizontal difference for 3D vision (meaning exactly the same objects in the view) ?
And finally, would you know if this would impinge on the code of other projects (I think to the project of oolite resizing, and maybe there is already another virtual reality project?) ?

The view camera may be attached to the player ship, but the camera position can be anywhere in the universe, as the 1.84 mobile external camera and external camera OXPs before that demonstrate. Rendering in two viewports in OpenGL is also possible, although I think that implementing this properly in Oolite might be trickier than it looks and might involve a relative performance impact as well. This is the opinion of someone who is not a rendering expert and it could be wrong, but that's what I gather after a somewhat quick google attempt.

If it is implemented, I can't think how it would influence directly other projects. On this subject, the another virtual reality project you are talking about is most likely the headtrack branch on github. This was an experiment that worked (quite well, actually), but was not merged into the main source due to it being quite tricky to setup and required the installation of third party software to function. Currently it conflicts with master, but I would think that it should be possible to resolve the existing conflicts relatively painlessly (it doesn't hurt being a bit optimistic every now and then) if we would want to revive it.

Also, regarding VR headsets integration, I had a look at the Oculus SDK about a year ago and it looked to me that it needed rendering to vertex buffer objects in order to work, which I don't think it is something we do in Oolite yet (I believe we are rendering directly to the screen). So, incorporating this or a similar SDK to the gane could involve some serious amount of low-level work.

As I wrote, I already tried the Telescope (and the extended telescope). As far as I understand, the Sniper Ring comes with the telescope, right ? I could not enable it as described in the Telescope wiki page, and I was massively disturbed by the masslock borders, so I sold the Telescope on the next station I docked ... Maxbe I just need some more explanation.

I'll try Sniper Camera System and/or Sniper Sight and give Telescope another try when I have a new joystick. The old one broke today
BTW ... The images in the Sniper Sight thread seem to have been deleted by imageshack.

Quote:

... the closest you can get to what you want with what we currently have available is building the game code with the setting OO_FOV_INFLIGHT_CONTROL_ENABLED set to yes ...
let me know and I can upload a suitably modified executable for you.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm a Linux user
I will check if I can easily build oolite on my distribution.

The view camera may be attached to the player ship, but the camera position can be anywhere in the universe, as the 1.84 mobile external camera and external camera OXPs before that demonstrate. Rendering in two viewports in OpenGL is also possible, although I think that implementing this properly in Oolite might be trickier than it looks and might involve a relative performance impact as well. This is the opinion of someone who is not a rendering expert and it could be wrong, but that's what I gather after a somewhat quick google attempt.

Well, I was planning on a maximum x2 performance impact, plus maybe an unknown memory impact.

Quote:

If it is implemented, I can't think how it would influence directly other projects. On this subject, the another virtual reality project you are talking about is most likely the headtrack branch on github. This was an experiment that worked (quite well, actually), but was not merged into the main source due to it being quite tricky to setup and required the installation of third party software to function. Currently it conflicts with master, but I would think that it should be possible to resolve the existing conflicts relatively painlessly (it doesn't hurt being a bit optimistic every now and then) if we would want to revive it.

Yes, it's this one. I should go and test it if it works

Quote:

Also, regarding VR headsets integration, I had a look at the Oculus SDK about a year ago and it looked to me that it needed rendering to vertex buffer objects in order to work, which I don't think it is something we do in Oolite yet (I believe we are rendering directly to the screen). So, incorporating this or a similar SDK to the gane could involve some serious amount of low-level work.

... the closest you can get to what you want with what we currently have available is building the game code with the setting OO_FOV_INFLIGHT_CONTROL_ENABLED set to yes ...
let me know and I can upload a suitably modified executable for you.

Thanks for the offer, but I'm a Linux user
I will check if I can easily build oolite on my distribution.